The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Distributed systems / cloud

Aleksey Charapko

charap.co

Distributed systems / cloudDatabasesSystems

’15’16’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
164 from 9 Sep 2015 to 2 May 2026
Posting
now and then (5 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://charap.co/feed/

2026 3

  1. Metastability in Recovery: Cascading Recovery with a Loop
  2. Murat and Aleksey Read Papers: “Self-Defining Systems”
  3. Murat and Aleksey Read Papers: “Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Looking Glass”

2025 11

  1. Murat and Aleksey Read Papers: “Rethinking the Cost of Distributed Caches for Datacenter Services”
  2. On Metastable Failures and Interactions Between Systems
  3. Murat and Aleksey Read Papers: “Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research”
  4. Academic Chat with Murat and Aleksey: 5 Cs of the Invisible Curriculum.
  5. HoliPaxos: Towards More Predictable Performance in State Machine Replication
  6. Fall 2025 Reading List (##201-210)
  7. Paper #196. The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling
  8. Paper #193. Databases in the Era of Memory-Centric Computing
  9. Paper #192. OLTP Through the Looking Glass 16 Years Later: Communication is the New Bottleneck
  10. Paper #191: Occam’s Razor for Distributed Protocols
  11. Spring 2025 Reading List (Papers ##191-200)

2024 6

  1. Fall 2024 Reading Group Papers (Papers ##181-190)
  2. Pile of Eternal Rejections: Revisiting Mencius SMR
  3. System’s Guy Teaching Game Development…
  4. Summer 2024 Reading Group Papers (Papers ##171-180)
  5. Pile of Eternal Rejections: The Cost of Garbage Collection for State Machine Replication
  6. Spring 2024 Reading Group Papers (##161-170)

2023 21

  1. Reading Group #153. Deep Note: Can Acoustic Interference Damage the Availability of Hard Disk Storage in Underwater Data Centers?
  2. Reading Group #152. Blueprint: A Toolchain for Highly-Reconfigurable Microservice Applications
  3. Reading Group 151. Towards Modern Development of Cloud ApplicationsReading Group 151.
  4. Reading Group #150. Model Checking Guided Testing for Distributed Systems.
  5. Reading Group #149. On-demand Container Loading in AWS Lambda
  6. Winter 2023-2024 Reading Group Papers
  7. Reading Group. Oakestra: A Lightweight Hierarchical Orchestration Framework for Edge Computing
  8. Reading Group. Palette Load Balancing: Locality Hints for Serverless Functions
  9. Reading Group. Chardonnay: Fast and General Datacenter Transactions for On-Disk Databases
  10. Cloudy Forecast: How Predictable is Communication Latency in the Cloud?
  11. Reading Group Paper. Take Out the TraChe: Maximizing (Tra)nsactional Ca(che) Hit Rate
  12. Reading Group Paper. Aggregate VM: Why Reduce or Evict VM’s Resources When You Can Borrow Them From Other Nodes?
  13. Reading Group Paper: Hyrax: Fail-in-Place Server Operation in Cloud Platforms
  14. Fall 2023 Reading Group Papers (##141-150)
  15. Spring Term Reading Group Papers: ##131-140
  16. Reading Group. DeepScaling: microservices autoscaling for stable CPU utilization in large scale cloud systems
  17. Reading Group. Method Overloading the Circuit
  18. Reading Group. How to fight production incidents?: an empirical study on a large-scale cloud service
  19. Reading Group. Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service
  20. Reading Group. The Case for Distributed Shared-Memory Databases with RDMA-Enabled Memory Disaggregation
  21. Reading Group. Not that Simple: Email Delivery in the 21st Century

2022 21

  1. Winter Term Reading Group Papers: ##121-130
  2. Fall Term Reading Group Papers: ##111-120
  3. Reading Group Special Session: Scalability and Fault Tolerance in YDB
  4. Metastable Failures in the Wild
  5. Reading Group. Darwin: Scale-In Stream Processing
  6. Reading Group. Achieving High Throughput and Elasticity in a Larger-than-Memory Store
  7. Reading Group. Shard Manager: A Generic Shard Management Framework for Geo-distributed Applications
  8. Reading Group. Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse
  9. New Reading List: Papers #101-110
  10. Reading Group. ByShard: Sharding in a Byzantine Environment
  11. Reading Group. CompuCache: Remote Computable Caching using Spot VMs
  12. Reading Group. Using Lightweight Formal Methods to Validate a Key-Value Storage Node in Amazon S3
  13. Reading Group. Basil: Breaking up BFT with ACID (transactions)
  14. Reading Group. EPaxos Revisited.
  15. New Reading List: Papers #91-100
  16. Reading Group. Log-structured Protocols in Delos
  17. Reading Group. Rabia: Simplifying State-Machine Replication Through Randomization
  18. Reading Group. Exploiting Nil-Externality for Fast Replicated Storage
  19. Reading Group. Faster and Cheaper Serverless Computing on Harvested Resources
  20. Reading Group Special Session: Fast General Purpose Transactions in Apache Cassandra
  21. Reading Group. Running BGP in Data Centers at Scale

2021 55

  1. Reading Group. Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process
  2. Reading Group. UniStore: A fault-tolerant marriage of causal and strong consistency
  3. Reading Group. Scaling Large Production Clusters with Partitioned Synchronization
  4. Reading Group. Characterizing and Optimizing Remote Persistent Memory with RDMA and NVM
  5. Reading Group. NrOS: Effective Replication and Sharing in an Operating System
  6. Reading Group Paper List. Papers ##81-90
  7. Reading Group. Avocado: A Secure In-Memory Distributed Storage System
  8. Reading Group. Prescient Data Partitioning and Migration for Deterministic Database Systems
  9. Reading Group. Viewstamped Replication Revisited
  10. Reading Group. Polyjuice: High-Performance Transactions via Learned Concurrency Control
  11. Reading Group. Meerkat: Multicore-Scalable Replicated Transactions Following the Zero-Coordination Principle
  12. How to Read Computer Science (Systems) Papers using Shampoo Algorithm
  13. Reading Group. DistAI: Data-Driven Automated Invariant Learning for Distributed Protocols
  14. One Page Summary. Photons: Lambdas on a diet
  15. Reading Group. In Reference to RPC: It’s Time to Add Distributed Memory
  16. Reading Group. Fault-Tolerant Replication with Pull-Based Consensus in MongoDB
  17. Reading Group. Move Fast and Meet Deadlines: Fine-grained Real-time Stream Processing with Cameo
  18. Reading Group Paper List. Papers ##71-80
  19. Reading Group. When Cloud Storage Meets RDMA
  20. Reading Group. Cores that don’t count
  21. Reading Group. FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store
  22. Reading Group. Evolution of Development Priorities in Key-value Stores Serving Large-scale Applications: The RocksDB Experience
  23. Reading Group. Unifying Timestamp with Transaction Ordering for MVCC with Decentralized Scalar Timestamp
  24. Scalable but Wasteful or Why Fast Replication Protocols are Actually Slow
  25. Reading Group. Strong and Efficient Consistency with Consistency-Aware Durability
  26. Reading Group. Conflict-free Replicated Data Types
  27. Reading Group. Exploiting Symbolic Execution to Accelerate Deterministic Databases
  28. Reading Group. Multitenancy for Fast and Programmable Networks in the Cloud.
  29. Reading Group Paper List. Papers ##61-70
  30. Reading Group. Cerebro: A Layered Data Platform for Scalable Deep Learning
  31. Reading Group. XFT: Practical Fault Tolerance beyond Crashes
  32. Metastable Failures in Distributed Systems
  33. Reading Group. chainifyDB: How to get rid of your Blockchain and use your DBMS instead
  34. Reading Group. Protocol-Aware Recovery for Consensus-Based Storage
  35. Reading Group Special Session: Distributed Transactions in YugabyteDB
  36. Reading Group. Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?
  37. Reading Group. New Directions in Cloud Programming
  38. Reading Group. Facebook’s Tectonic Filesystem: Efficiency from Exascale
  39. Reading Group. Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of Distributed Systems
  40. Reading Group. Aragog: Scalable Runtime Verification of Shardable Networked Systems
  41. Reading Group. Protean: VM Allocation Service at Scale
  42. Reading Group. Sundial: Fault-tolerant Clock Synchronization for Datacenters
  43. Reading Group Special Session: Building Distributed Systems With Stateright
  44. Reading Group. Heterogeneity-Aware Cluster Scheduling Policies for Deep Learning Workloads
  45. Reading Group. FlightTracker: Consistency across Read-Optimized Online Stores at Facebook
  46. Reading Group Paper List. Papers ##51-60.
  47. Reading Group. Pegasus: Tolerating Skewed Workloads in Distributed Storage with In-Network Coherence Directories
  48. Reading Group. Performance-Optimal Read-Only Transactions
  49. Reading Group. Microsecond Consensus for Microsecond Applications
  50. Reading Group. Cobra: Making Transactional Key-Value Stores Verifiably Serializable.
  51. Reading Group. A large scale analysis of hundreds of in-memory cache clusters at Twitter.
  52. Reading Group. Virtual Consensus in Delos
  53. Planetary-Scale Systems Seminar Spring 2021
  54. Reading Group. hXDP: Efficient Software Packet Processing on FPGA NICs
  55. Reading Group. Toward a Generic Fault Tolerance Technique for Partial Network Partitioning

2020 10

  1. Reading Group. Near-Optimal Latency Versus Cost Tradeoffs in Geo-Distributed Storage
  2. Reading Group. Autoscaling Tiered Cloud Storage in Anna.
  3. Reading Group Paper List. Papers ##37-50
  4. Reading Group. Compositional Programming and Testing of Dynamic Distributed Systems
  5. Reading Group. Aria: A Fast and Practical Deterministic OLTP Database.
  6. Reading Group. High availability in cheap distributed key value storage
  7. Reading Group. RMWPaxos: Fault-Tolerant In-Place Consensus Sequences
  8. Ocean Vista: Gossip-Based Visibility Control for Speedy Geo-Distributed Transactions
  9. One Page Summary. Gryff: Unifying Consensus and Shared Registers
  10. PigPaxos: continue devouring communication bottlenecks in distributed consensus.

2019 3

  1. One Page Summary. Aegean: Replication beyond the client-server model
  2. One Page Summary: Ring Paxos
  3. Paper Summary: Bolt-On Global Consistency for the Cloud

2018 8

  1. Keep The Data Where You Use It
  2. Looking at State and Operational Consistency
  3. Python, Numpy and a Programmer Error: Story of a Bizarre Bug
  4. One Page Summary: “PaxosStore: High-availability Storage Made Practical in WeChat”
  5. Modeling Paxos Performance in Wide Area – Part 3
  6. Modeling Paxos Performance – Part 2
  7. Paxos Performance Modeling – Part 1.5
  8. Do not Blame (only) Network for Your Paxos Scalability Issues. (PPM Part 1)

2017 14

  1. Trace Synchronization with HLC
  2. One Page Summary: Flease – Lease Coordination without a Lock Server
  3. One Page Summary: “milliScope: a Fine-Grained Monitoring Framework for Performance Debugging of n-Tier Web Services”
  4. Sonification of Distributed Systems with RQL
  5. Retroscoping Zookeeper Staleness
  6. Why Government IT is Expensive and Archaic
  7. The First Datastore-driven Vehicle
  8. One Page Summary: “Musketeer: all for one, one for all in data processing systems”.
  9. One Page Summary: “Slicer: Auto-Sharding for Datacenter Applications”
  10. Monitoring with Retroscope: Detecting Invariant Violations
  11. One Page Summary: Incremental, Iterative Processing with Timely Dataflow
  12. Is Java Fast Enough for Distributed Applications?
  13. Globally Consistent Distributed Snapshots with Retroscope
  14. Gorilla – Facebook’s Cache for Time Series Data

2016 5

  1. The Light of Voldemort
  2. Pivot Tracing Part 2
  3. The Sound of Voldemort
  4. Review – Pivot Tracing: Dynamic Causal Monitoring for Distributed Systems
  5. Review: Implementing Linearizability at Large Scale and Low Latency

2015 7

  1. A Few Words about Inconsistent Replication (IR)
  2. EPaxos: Consensus with no leader
  3. Consensus with Raft Algorithm
  4. About Google’s Dataflow Model
  5. Understanding ZooKeeper
  6. Graph Processing at Facebook Scale
  7. New Blog